Dyeing to Play

The beginning of my weekend is starting out as planned – ish! I hope it stays this way!! I feel a bug coming on and I’m doing my best to ignore it and hope that it stays to a dull roar so I can enjoy the next three days and not be sick … I swear there is nothing worse than being sick on your days off and that’s usually the way it happens. Well I don’t miss work that way

I’ve combined a few different methods of resist painting / dyeing. First ones you see here I painted with my fabric paint and am letting them dry. I used different methods of folding for these to create different ‘textures’, ,although it was likely a waste of time as I’m dyeing over this and the textures won’t be so prevalent. I’m also not sure how the previous paint will react after it’s dry. I’ll heat set it and see how it goes from there. But it was fun, I’ve not done this in a long time and I enjoyed experimenting with various brushes, sponges and using water or not. Tomorrow I’ll be using green on top of this after I use wax to make different shapes to have these colours peek on through. I’m hoping these colours will help tie in all the bright colours I’m using in this quilt.

Painting wax on fabric is different than i expected I used material from my previous resist dyeing that I had an matched, and also some of my own hand dyed. I had to use more wax than I expected but I got the hang of it quick enough. Dharma Trading has a really great how to section and found this for batik dyeing The pieces are small enough so that it did go quickly – I just hope that these aren’t to big and some of the detail will show through I’m thinking it was to big I’ll use smaller designs on the pieces that are drying now. I’ll have more than enough background – least I hope so LOL If not, I’ll do more and love doing it!

I thought spirals, paw prints and leaves would be pretty cool to use, I’m thinking that dots and stripes or maybe an abstract butterfly will look interesting on the other pieces. I just need to get it small enough so that I don’t have blobs instead of designs. I’m thinking of doing glue resist on the other three pieces tomorrow – I would like to try that method. Or even a marbling technique.

This was a great way to unwind after a trying week at work and I’m glad that I was running low on my greens! I am debating on whether to dye up the 2 yards of muslin I have green or just do fabric paint for these. I’m still not sure what I’ll use for the borders, but pretty sure it won’t be green or not a lot of it. Everything evolves – I’m sure this will change again and again and again

Welcome …

to the place where I share my wacky thoughts, weird and novel ideas and even weirder math relating to my quilts and some other facets of my life. Comments are always welcome .. please feel free to add yours :)